Download lia394-Lecture11 - Arizona State University

Lesson 11:
What about that other Alien?
Professor Daniel Bernardi/
Professor Michelle Martinez
In the last lecture…
– “Who are the reel
aliens?”
– Science Fiction Genre
– White hero vs. Alien
other
– Alien invader as stand
in for Latino immigrant
– Blade Runner (1982)
2
In this Lecture…
• Documentary Films
-As anthropology
-As self-representation
• “What about that other alien?”
-Criminalization of
undocumented immigrants
-Documenting the
undocumented
3
Documentary Films
Lesson 11: Part 1
4
Documentary
Documentary film is a broad category of visual
expression that is based on the attempt, in one
fashion or another, to "document" reality. Although
"documentary film" originally referred to movies
shot on film stock, it has subsequently expanded to
include video and digital productions.
Documentary, as it applies here, works to identify a
"filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and
mode of audience reception" that is continually
evolving and is without clear boundaries.
-Wikipedia
Click here for more information on documentary films.
5
Paul Espinosa
•
•
•
•
Noted documentarian
ASU professor
Emmy award winner
Many works aired on
PBS
• PhD in Anthropology
Click here to read more
about Paul Espinosa
6
From Anthropology
“Anthropologists, as many of us know,
typically go someplace far away, like the
South Sea Islands, and study what the
‘natives’ do. After they finish their
fieldwork, they return home, usually to a
university in the First Worlds, and write up
their observations about ‘what the natives
do’.”
7
From Anthropology
“I decided to go to a ‘village’ in southern
California named Hollywood and study
what the ‘natives’ do. I thought it could be
productive to study this ‘village’ and train
the anthropological lens on media makers
themselves”
-Interview with Paul Espinosa by Dr. Daniel Bernardi
8
To Documentary
“As I surveyed the TV landscape in the late 1970s,
another thing became glaringly apparent -- the way
in which my own community, Mexican Americans
and Latinos in general- were imaged in the media.
Either the presentation was very stereotypical-where the only Latino characters you saw were gang
bangers, gardeners, maids or prostitutes -- or,
Latinos were completely invisible. This reality, along
with a budding relationship with the PBS affiliate in
San Diego, led me to become actively involved in
producing content about my own community.”
-Interview with Paul Espinosa by Dr. Daniel Bernardi
9
Ballad of an Unsung Hero
(1983)
• Biographical look at Pedro J.
Gonzalez
– Telegraph operator for Pancho Villa
– Spanish language radio program out of
Los Angeles, most successful of its time
– Framed in 1934 and sent to San
Quentin
10
Documenting the Latino
Experience
“I have come to appreciate the paramount
importance of good storytelling. At the same time,
I have also found so many absences in the media,
in terms of stories about the Latino experience. I
found myself wanting to pursue such stories, and
finding often that these stories required a kind of
excavation. You had to dig down, and often dig
deep, in order to recuperate these stories.”
-Interview with Paul Espinosa by Dr. Daniel Bernardi
11
The Lemon Grove Incident
(1986)
• Focuses on one of the earliest school
desegregation cases in U.S. history.
• Utilizes a combination of dramatized scenes,
interviews, and historical footage.
12
Putting History on Film
“Of course, most of us know the landmark
case of Brown vs. Board of Education (1954)
and when we think about school segregation,
we usually think about it in black and white
terms. But in fact, many early segregation
cases occurred in the Southwest and they
involved not just African American children but
Mexican American, Native American, and
Asian American children.”
13
Putting History on Film
“The Lemon Grove Incident is the story
of one of these cases. The film was
part of a larger effort of recuperating
aspects of the Mexican American
historical experience, since so much of
that experience had never made its
way into the history book.”
-Interview with Paul Espinosa by Dr. Daniel Bernardi
14
Uneasy Neighbors (1990)
• A documentary profile of
growing tensions
between migrant worker
camps and affluent
homeowners in north
San Diego
• Chronicles the life and
death of the Green
Valley camp
15
Applied Anthropology
“In a general sense, my work is an example of
applied anthropology, taking insights about culture,
conflict, and change and presenting stories with
meaning for a broad general audience. Perhaps the
way in which my work has differed most from
traditional anthropology (whatever that is) is in the
question of audience, my objective has been to
reach a broad public audience, and to inform them
about relevant social and cultural issues.”
-Interview with Paul Espinosa by Dr. Daniel Bernardi
16
John Caldwell
• Professor of Film,
Media and Television
at UCLA
• Creative work centers
on cultural
investigations
• Particularly interested
in “indigenism”
17
Academia = Tell
“Blanket critical/theoretical prohibitions against
representing the other are typically offered from
positions of academic privilege. Most of these
intellectual taboos ignore the sad fact that othering
habits frequently emerge as integral part of local
socio-political systems and conflicts. In most of these
cross-cultural quagmires, indigenism is rarely
evident in any pure, isolatable form; or accessible to
the filmmaker in a stable or clean state.”
-John Caldwell
18
Academia = Tell
“We called attention to the privileged
position which anthropologists has
traditionally held- knowing that they usually
came from First World countries and
studies in Third World communities which
were relatively powerless in comparison to
where they came from”
-Interview with Paul Espinosa by Dr. Daniel Bernardi
19
Documentary = Show
“Filmmakers, academics, and activists owe
it to themselves and their constituents to
more carefully pick apart the layers of
outside interest that typically broach,
exploit, and manage indigenous racial
identities in public”
-John Caldwell
20
Kuije Kanan: Managalase
Tattooing (1985)
• Ethnographic documentary
• Explores the prohibition of an ancient
practice/art through interviews and reenactments
21
Documenting Culture as
Preservation
“The documentary represented a rather
simple and direct attempt to allow the
surviving elders to demonstrate and
resurrect this culture-defining practice for
other villagers, their families and children.”
-John Caldwell
22
From Freak Street to Goa
• Freak Street
-Released in 1989
-Filmed from 1980-1986
• Tracks privileged westerners as
they explore and “reverse
immigrant” to third world cultures.
23
Filming Up
“With nationalism and colonialism
apparently at passe, indigenism has
emerged as a favored rhetorical ploy that
is used and misused by all sorts of crosscultural players. Earnest free-thinkers
invoke ‘their’ indigenism to ‘counter’
exploitive U.S. culture, European
commercialism, and globalization.”
- John Caldwell
24
Rancho California (por favor)
• Exposed how the suburban migrant
indigenous lived in the San Diego margins
• Chronicles the struggles and attempts to
maintain culture, rights in third world
conditions in heart of first world
neighborhood
25
Visualizing the Invisible
“Several of my UCSD students from the
area denied that such camps existed.
These (fairly symptomatic) denials made
me look for how racial identities were
being conventionalized as natural
phenomena in Southern California’s
‘picturesque’ landscape.”
-John Caldwell
26
The Big Point
The use of documentary becomes a
means to speak alternatively about what
society and mainstream media keeps
‘invisible’ such as issues of ‘otherness’,
anything that may upset the status quo.
Documentary filmmaking allows for selfrepresentation and criticism of power
structure in a media available to a wide
audience.
27
The “Other” Alien
Lesson 11: Part 2
28
Uneasy Neighbors (1990)
• By Paul Espinosa
• Profiles growing tensions between
migrant worker camps and affluent
homeowners in north San Diego
• Seeks to de-criminalize and subvert
the notion of immigrant as alien
29
Rancho California (por favor)
(2002)
• By John Caldwell
• Exposed how the suburban migrant
indigenous lived in the San Diego
margins
• Highlighted the differences regarding
indigenous migrant vs. Mexican migrant
experience
30
From Heat
“Back in the early 1980s, and even today,
the topic was often framed around the
issue of criminal activity. And the media
contributed to this framing by generating a
large amount of coverage of immigrants
being apprehended at the border.”
-Interview with Paul Espinosa by Dr. Daniel Bernardi
31
To Light
“The iconic image was a nighttime scene of poor
Mexican immigrants, hands held high, as border
patrol agents with night scopes and helicopters
arrested them and sent them back to Mexico.
This was a classic case of media shedding lots
of heat but no light on a topic. I believed that to
gain even a basic understanding of immigration,
you had to know who these people were and
why they were coming north.”
-Interview with Paul Espinosa by Dr. Daniel Bernardi
32
A Third World Hidden within
the First
“Third world conditions
were the norm and
pervaded scores of camps
throughout north San
Diego county. But by what
logic had these conditions
been made socially
acceptable in the region?”
-John Caldwell
33
Managed Oppression
“In Rancho California (por favor), I decided to
shift away from any attempt at creating a pure
ethnic space for expression in order to try to
articulate the many material layers and symbolic
boundaries that the public uses to construct and
assign race. What emerged, on camera, and in
interviews, was a very real sense that the ruralsuburban landscape in the area of the camps
was meticulously managed.”
-John Caldwell
34
The Other within the Other
“Anti-immigration rhetoric demonized all migrants as
“Mexicans” and “illegals”. At the same time,
resurgent, flag-waving Mexican nationalism evident
in the anti Prop-187 rallies in Los Angeles and San
Diego totalized immigration in a different way -- one
that created a monolithic nationalist block that
covered over all sorts of cultural heterogeneity within
the migrant worker communities. Yet, the Mixtecos
we interviewed in the camps saw themselves as a
self-governing and indigenous -- not as Mexicans.”
-John Caldwell
35
The Big Point
By filming their documentaries, Espinosa ad
Caldwell use the media to expose societies
criminalization and participation in the
reinforcement of racial and social
stratification. Both filmmakers show how
complex and fluid the construction of the
‘other’ can be and seek to show an accurate
portrayal of an issue that often gets
demonized in the mainstream media.
36
End of Lecture 11
Next Lecture:
Is Authenticity Possible?
37